The nineteenth century bourgeois interior has a reputation for being an oppressive, dysfunctional, and lifeless space, separated from the outside world. This way of thinking was cultivated by the modernist movement during the interwar period. No one expressed it more pointedly than Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street (1928):
The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s—with its gigantic sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing gas flames—fittingly houses only the corpse. “On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered.” The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead body.1
A long strand of critical theories in this tradition has seen comfort as a driver of alienation and of an ever-deepening separation between humans and nature. Recently, for instance, the Italian philosopher and anthropologist Stefano Boni claimed that “contemporary comfort is the result of a technologically-propelled screening of humanity from the toil and impurity associated with direct contact with the organic world.”2
The history of domestic work and practices of cleaning and dust removal in nineteenth-century Germany allows for a different history of comfort, one that does not screen humans from nature, but deeply entangles them with the environment. Domestic environments are not just passive backdrops, a “soulless luxury,” but rather ecologically rich spaces. They form part of an “indoor biome” which has been rapidly expanding since the nineteenth century as a product of human niche construction.3 The gendered, and often invisible work which nineteenth-century housewives put into producing and maintaining comfortable environments engaged them in everyday intimate encounters with the materialities of their domestic environments, from foodstuffs, fuels, light sources, and indoor air to, here specifically, dust and dirt.4 In the words of environmental historian Richard White, they “knew nature through work.”5
Comfort and Dust in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Germans only started to speak of “Comfort” (later spelled “Komfort”) over the course of the nineteenth century.6 The word and concept was imported from the English language. Originally referring to various forms of strengthening (from Latin confortare, to strengthen), such as spiritual or social solace, “comfort” had gained a new layer of meaning in eighteenth-century Britain: as historian John Crowley puts it, a “modern emphasis on the self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between one’s body and its immediate physical environment.”7 It is only this new layer of meaning that was imported into the German language in the nineteenth century.
It is no coincidence that the concept of Komfort, referring exclusively to the relationship between human bodies and their material environments, gained currency in a period in which domestic environments saw dramatic changes in the wake of industrialization, urbanization, and the mechanization of the household. Denoting a mild emotion of satisfaction, Komfort became a marker of appropriateness on a scale ranging from necessity to luxury.8 As such, nineteenth century notions of Komfort were closely associated with progress, civilization, national, and even racial superiority. Komfort became a vital concern especially for the bourgeois middle classes, and cleanliness, particularly the removal of dust and dirt, became privileged signs of the achieved level of Komfort.9
For the nineteenth-century imagination, dust clearly belonged outside a comfortable home. As the writer Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg expressed in the popular illustrated family journal Die Gartenlaube: “Part of the comfort of such a house is that the doors and windows close well, because we don’t want the noise from the street or its dust inside the house.”10 Usually, though, keeping windows and doors closed does not suffice to keep a house dust-free. Rather, removing dust requires constant work and, in nineteenth-century Germany, made up a major proportion of everyday household chores. The tedious work of removing domestic dust was usually seen and justified as a moral obligation for housewives. Most household advice manuals from the period concluded their instructions for Großreinemachen (the big cleanup) with an appeal to the “woman’s duty.”11 Henriette Davidis, one of the most widely read authors of cookbooks and household advice manuals in nineteenth-century Germany, reminded her readers in Die Hausfrau (1870) that a good housewife must never abandon herself to negligence, and chose dusting as a metaphor to stress her argument: “You will generally find that in this section [of the book] for the most part only trifles are dealt with, but trifles add up and in the course of time penetrate like the shower of dust.”12
Several wider developments that took place in the mid-nineteenth century contributed to the importance ascribed to dust removal. Firstly, as cities and industries grew with industrialization, new pollution problems emerged. Increasing traffic intensity led to more street dust, and the shift from wood fires to coal fires—in particular in the home—made soot a primary ingredient of domestic dust, and a very hard one to clean at that.13 Secondly, a new attentiveness for pollution emerged as physicians, hygienists, and other scientists began to closely investigate the environments of everyday life. As one hygiene manual wrote:
The constant changes in things and beings on our Earth provide the most variegated detritus, and therefore we find particles of the most variable chemical and physical composition in airborne dust. Common salt is found very frequently, apparently carried up from the sea surface with water vapor and water dust and transported to the continent by sea winds. The street dust consists of more or less large grains and splinters of the types of stone that make up the paving, walls, and roofs, of sand, dry horse manure, or other rubbish. It also contains charcoal particles from the soot of furnaces. Hair, wool and cotton fibers, mostly caused by the wear and tear of clothing. Starch cells, iron particles etc. in great abundance. But also the rarest and most valuable materials can be found in the street dust of the cities, even gold and silver. (Coins lose up to 2 percent of their metal value after ten years of circulation.) The plant world provides dust containing seeds, spores, germs, and pollen or plant detritus and decay products. The animal kingdom produces dust consisting of epithelium, pus cells, dried up se- and excretions, particles of unaltered, decaying or decomposed body tissue etc.14
From the perspective of the emerging dust sciences of the nineteenth century, dust thus constituted something of a microscopic archive of urban life and the urban environment. This archive tended to accumulate in enclosed spaces such as the home, where there was little ventilation and no precipitation to bind or carry particles away. And, as discoveries of the newly emerging science of bacteriology revealed, dust turned out to provide a habitat for a plethora of invisible, dangerous creatures.15
Against this backdrop, the moral implications of cleanliness and dust removal became underpinned by hygienic concerns. As Joel Tarr and Mark Tebeau have argued, housewives were identified in this period as “home safety managers” who held the responsibility to create and maintain a risk-free environment for their family.16 In this role, housewives were expected to guard and maintain the borders between the “separate spheres” on both a symbolical and a material level.17 Dust, however, unremittingly crosses these boundaries, between what the nineteenth century imagined as the male sphere of the city and the female sphere of the home, between the outdoors and the indoors, the wild and the domesticated. Hence, housewives found themselves in a “perpetual war of annihilation” against the “enemies” of cleanliness, as Marie Clima put it in her 1874 manual Haushaltungskunde. “But the worst enemy of cleanliness is dust.”18
In removing dust, nineteenth-century German housewives came into close, even too close encounter with nature. The vast corpus of household advice manuals that flooded the book market starting in the mid-nineteenth century reveal a domestic interior which is far from lifeless, rather appearing as a “living something,” an environment populated with both human and non-human agency.19 Addressed mostly to housewives of an emerging middle class, and often written by housewives themselves, these publications propagated specific norms of housework and an intricate set of knowledge regarding cleaning.20 The vocabulary alone used to denote “dusting” is impressive. For a daily cleaning routine, Luise Oesterwitz’s Haushaltungskunde (1912) recommends:
Carpets and upholstered furniture are brushed [abgebürstet] … and the floor is swept [aufgekehrt]… After furniture, picture frames, doors, etc. have been thoroughly dusted [abgestaubt], the floor should be damp-washed [feucht aufzuwaschen]. Parquet and linoleum floors are only swept [gekehrt] and rubbed [abgerieben] with a soft, woolen cloth.21
Aiming at an upper-middle-class audience, Antonie Steimann’s Die tüchtige Hausfrau [The Diligent Housewife] (1913) introduces an even more delicate—and untranslatable—vocabulary, including “abgestöbert,” “abgefächelt,” and “abgepinselt” to describe cleaning practices attuned to fragile textiles, paintings, and plaster figures.22 This vocabulary points to a detailed embodied knowledge involved in dusting practices, a detailed knowledge of the materials, and the bodily motions appropriate for dusting different objects in different parts of the home.
The knowledge required for dusting became more and more elaborate over the course of the nineteenth century as consumption patterns changed. For instance, carpets, previously rare, became popular in middle-class German households towards the end of the century, creating a new potential source of danger and a new household chore.23 “The carpet luxury [Teppichluxus] has recently become very prevalent; people love them as large as possible, so that they cover almost the entire floor, and forget that particles of wool and dye, plant fibers and street dirt are constantly rising from the fabric, which cannot possibly be good for the lungs,” one advice manual warned.24 Most manuals thus asked housewives to sweep carpets every day, give them a wet scrubbing weekly, and beat them out in intervals ranging from weekly to bimonthly.
The cleaning methods proposed in the advice literature are remarkable in how they trouble any neat boundaries between an inside and an outside sphere and unmask the environmental entanglements of the home. For instance, some manuals held that “[s]mall carpets can be freshened up very nicely by pulling them over a shorn damp lawn after beating them out, or sweeping clean snow over them in winter.”25 More surprising, perhaps, are some of the cleaning agents recurring in the literature. According to Henriette Davidis, sweeping carpets should be done “with damp, preferably freshly drunk tea leaves, or with damp, not wet, grass or with finely chopped cabbage leaves.”26 While it seems hard to imagine how households would regularly procure sufficient amounts of freshly infused tea leaves, the reference to tea leaves is rarely missing in any advice manual, while other methods using damp grass, wet coffee powder, wet saw dust, cabbage, or even sauerkraut, figure less consistently.27
This close intersection of foodstuffs and cleaning agents is today almost unthinkable given the rise of synthetic cleaning products.28 At the same time, the use of tea leaves, as well as that of coffee powder or of brooms made with piassava fibers,29 point to how cleaning practices materially linked domestic environments to global environments and to streams of colonial resource extraction.
Knowing Nature Through Domestic Work
Nineteenth-century German advice manuals rarely explicitly speak of comfort (“Komfort”) in relation to cleaning, and if they do, they do so with regard to how to make cleaning as unobtrusive as possible for a seemingly ever-irritable husband. Josephine Huber, for instance, urged housewives that when cleaning, “the master of the house should feel little of it and his and the general comfort should suffer as little loss as possible.”30 It is no surprise, then, that Western theories of comfort, which have mostly been written by men, often see comfort as a static property of objects, and have thus neglected the work necessary for maintaining comfort. The gendered invisibility of the work going into maintaining comfort has contributed to the illusion rehearsed in comfort theories: that comfort successfully disconnects us from the forces of nature and that the home is effectively an enclosed space.
In his 1995 essay “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” Richard White criticized environmentalists’ disregard for how work mediates relations with nature and argued that this disregard has contributed to ideas of an ever-widening separation between humans and nature. Writing about his own academic work in his comfortable Seattle office, White reflects:
If I sat and typed here day after day … I would become achingly aware of my body… My body, the nature in me, would rebel. The lights on this screen need electricity, and this particular electricity comes from dams on the Skagit or Columbia… The electricity they produce depends on the great seasonal cycles of the planet: on falling snow, melting waters, flowing rivers. In the end, these electrical impulses will take tangible form on paper from trees. Nature, altered and changed, is in this room. But this is masked. I type. I kill nothing. I touch no living thing. I seem to alter nothing but the screen. If I don’t think about it, I can seem benign… But, of course, the natural world has changed and continues to change to allow me to sit here… My separation is an illusion. What is disguised is that I—unlike loggers, farmers, fishers, or herders—do not have to face what I alter, and so I learn nothing from it.31
Even if White emphasizes the environmental entanglements of modern office work and of the comfortable infrastructures that make this kind of work possible, he still refers to work performed outdoors and typically by men—“loggers, farmers, fishers, or herders”—as a model of work which is in connection with nature. He does not take into consideration the housework necessary for maintaining his comfortable indoor office environment (typically performed by under-paid, often female and migrant office cleaners), and he still upholds a strong separation between an indoor and an outdoor environment. By contrast, practices of cleaning and dusting reveal domestic environments as environments in the full, ecological sense. They can teach us to understand comfort not as the property of objects, but rather as an often-gendered practice of maintaining environments and their habitability. The interior is not the interior.
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 26. For this take on the nineteenth-century interior see Kira Jürjens, “Ein weiteres Kleid: Zur Wissensgeschichte häuslich-textiler Umgebungen im 19. Jahrhundert,” NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, 29, no. 1 (March 2021): 11.
Stefano Boni, “Technologically-Propelled Comfort: Some Theoretical Implications of the Contemporary Overcoming of Fatigue,” Antropologia 3, no. 1 (2016): 133–51. Cf. Stefano Boni, Homo confort: Le prix à payer d’une vie sans efforts ni contraintes, 2nd ed. (Paris: L’Échappée, 2022). Earlier and more nuanced versions of such an alienation theory can be found in Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings: IV 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 313–55; or Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford University Press, 1948).
Laura J. Martin et al., “Evolution of the Indoor Biome,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 30, no. 4 (2015): 223–32; “Molding the Planet: Human Niche Construction at Work,” ed. Maurits W. Ertsen et al., special issue, RCC Perspectives, no. 5 (2016).
For the sake of brevity, I make two major simplifications here: 1) I refer to “housewives” not so much as a real entity out there but rather as a social type or role, as proposed by Nancy Reagin. Also, I omit the division of labor within the household, among housewives and servants, as well as children. 2) I speak of the nineteenth century, yet most of my empirical material stems from the period from around 1850 when the social type of the bourgeois housewife first developed, and up to the First World War. Cf. Nancy Ruth Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16–48.
Richard White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 171–85.
Cf. Horst Mühlmann, Luxus und Komfort: Wortgeschichte und Wortvergleich (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1975).
Cf. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain & Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), ix. See also Jon Stobart, Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022).
Cf. Marie Odile-Bernez, “Comfort, the Acceptable Face of Luxury: An Eighteenth-Century Cultural Etymology,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 3–21.
To give just one graphic example, a young German woman who emigrated to Brazil towards the end of the century, noted in her diary shortly after her arrival: “São Paulo is one of the most beautiful cities in Brazil, but I, for my part, can discover nothing of this beauty. The streets are mostly narrow and dirty and most of the houses, like ours, are only on the ground floor, small, unsightly and dirty inside and out. At Consul Trost’s, where I was invited to dinner on the first Sunday, it was comfortable and clean, you could recognize the German. When I arrived, our service staff consisted entirely of black people. The chambermaid Elisa is very greasy, as is Sebastian the servant, cook and coachman look a little cleaner.” (Tagebuch 1889–1899, Deutsches Tagebucharchiv 862-1, 143f.). On this context more broadly, cf. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation.
Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg, “Die Poesie unserer vier Wände: Der kleine oder häusliche, der gelehrte, der gemüthliche und der elegante Comfort,” Die Gartenlaube. Illustrirtes Familienblatt, no. 38 (1864): 600. All translations from the German sources by the author.
Cf. Luise Oesterwitz, Was muß jedes junge Mädchen, insbesondere jede junge Frau von der Haushaltungskunde wissen? Eine leichtfaßliche Darstellung alles Wissenswerten über praktische Wirtschaftsführung, über die Ernährung des Menschen, die Zubereitung der Speisen und das Kochen (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, 1912), 21. I would like to thank Kirstin Csutor and Carola Kohler at Museum Europäischer Kulturen, Berlin, for providing me with access to most of the manuals analyzed here.
Henriette Davidis, Die Hausfrau: Praktische Anleitung zur selbstständigen und sparsamen Führung von Stadt- und Landhaushaltungen, 5th ed. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1870), 53.
Cf. Elfi Bendikat, “Umweltverschmutzung durch Verkehrsemissionen am Beispiel von Berlin und Paris 1900–1930,” in Environmental Problems in European Cities in the 19th and 20th Century / Umweltprobleme in europäischen Städten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Christoph Bernhardt, 2nd. ed. (Munster: Waxmann, 2004); and Frank Uekötter, Von der Rauchplage zur ökologischen Revolution: Eine Geschichte der Luftverschmutzung in Deutschland und den USA 1880–1970 (Essen: Klartext, 2003). On the differences between wood-based and coal-based cleaning systems see Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Our Homes Changed Everything (London: Michael O’Mara, 2020), 216-63.
Max Rubner, Lehrbuch der Hygiene: Systematische Darstellung der Hygiene und ihrer wichtigsten Untersuchungs-Methoden (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1890), 42. Emphasis in the original.
Cf. Th. Oehmcke, Über Luft und Lüftung der Wohnung und verwandte Fragen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1904); and Jens Soentgen, “Die Kulturgeschichte des Staubes,” in Staub: Spiegel der Umwelt, ed. Jens Soentgen (Munich: Oekom, 2006).
Joel A. Tarr and Mark Tebeau, “Housewives as Home Safety Managers: The Changing Perception of the Home as a Place of Hazard and Risk, 1870–1914,” in Accidents in History: Injuries, Fatalities and Social Relations, ed. Roger Cooter and Bill Luckin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 196–233. See also Ruth Sandwell, “Women, Fear, and Fossil Fuels,” in In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy, ed. Abigail Harrison Moore and Ruth W. Sandwell (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 67–89; and Ute Frevert, “‘Fürsorgliche Belagerung’: Hygienebewegung und Arbeiterfrauen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 4 (1985): 420–46.
Cf. Susanne Breuss, “Die Stadt, der Staub und die Hausfrau: Zum Verhältnis von schmutziger Stadt und sauberem Heim,” in Urbane Welten: Referate der Österreichischen Volkskundetagung 1998 in Linz, ed. Olaf Bockhorn et al.,(Vienna: Verein für Volkskunde, 1999), 360–61.
Marie Clima, Haushaltungskunde: Ein Lehr- und Lesebuch für Lehrerinnen-Bildungsanstalten und höhere Töchterschulen, 3rd ed. (Vienna: A. Pichlers Witwe & Sohn, 1874), 3.
The quote is from the modernist manual Erna Meyer, Der neue Haushalt: Ein Wegweiser zu wirtschaftlicher Hausführung, 31st. ed. (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung, 1926), 76. But earlier publications likewise portray the home as a living organism with its own agency, cf. the elaborate table of contents structured according to materials used in the household in Friedrich Martin Duttenhofer, Die Lehre von der Hauswirthschaft mit besonderer Rücksicht auf technische und chemische Grundsätze (Stuttgart: Verlags-Bureau, 1846); the hygienic reasoning in Carl von Rechenberg, Hausherr und Hausfrau: Wissenschaft und Praxis des häuslichen Lebens (Kassel: Theodor Fischer, 1889); or the detailed instructions in Magdalene Ernst, Handbuch der Hausfrau, 4th ed. (Leipzig: F. W. v. Biedermann, 1893).
On the genre see Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 23–28; and Inga Wiedemann, Herrin im Hause: Durch Koch- und Haushaltsbücher zur bürgerlichen Hausfrau (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1993).
Oesterwitz, Haushaltungskunde, 17.
Steimann, Antonie. Die tüchtige Hausfrau: Ein praktisches Nachschlagebuch der gesamten Hauswirtschaft, Kochkunst, Putzmacherei, Hausschneiderei, Wäschenäherei, Kunststopferei, sämtlicher Handarbeiten nebst nahezu 1000 erprobten Ratschlägen und einem neuen großen Kochlexikon für die sparsame Hausfrau (Stuttgart: Süddeutsches Verlags-Institut; Vienna: Österreichisches Verlags-Institut, 1913), 15, 16.
Cf. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation, 26–27. In some German regions, carpets replaced sand as a floor covering. Sand was used for scrubbing but likewise as a floor adornment, especially in the parlor (Stube), cf. August Gandert, Tragkörbe in Hessen: Kulturelle und wirtschaftliche Bedeutung des Korbes (Kassel: Erich Röth, 1963). According to Cornelius Gurlitt, this shift also had hygienic reasons, as “Doctors have turned against the dust it creates,” cf. Cornelius Gurlitt, Im Bürgerhause: Plaudereien über Kunst, Kunstgewerbe und Wohnungsausstattung (Dresden: Gilbers, 1888), 155.
von Rechenberg, Hausherr und Hausfrau, 693.
Ernst, Handbuch der Hausfrau, 235.
Davidis, Die Hausfrau, 136.
von Rechenberg, Hausherr und Hausfrau, 614; Ernst, Handbuch der Hausfrau, 234.
von Rechenberg also recommends cleaning paper hangings with old rye bread (cf. von Rechenberg, Hausherr und Hausfrau, 618). It speaks to the intimate relation between the human body and its abode, which not only nineteenth-century architects and hygienists were aware of, but which reached deep into the everyday lives of people.[footnote Cf. Didem Ekici, “Skin, Clothing, and Dwelling: Max von Pettenkofer, the Science of Hygiene, and Breathing Walls,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 3 (2016): 281–98.
Ernst, Handbuch der Hausfrau, 234.
Josephine Huber, Universal-Haushaltungsbuch: Goldene Ratschläge für das eigene Heim (Straubing: Attenkofer, 1908), 11. Von Ungern-Sternberg likewise mused, that women who avidly cleaned the study of a scholar “do not know that to lift the scholar out of the dust is to remove him from his comfort.” (Von Ungern-Sternberg, “Die Poesie unserer vier Wände,” 601.) See also the remarks on cleaning the husband’s study in Davidis, Die Hausfrau, 105–7; as well as the warning of excessive cleaning in Clima, Haushaltungskunde, 11.
White, “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’,” 184.
